Tuesday, June 11, 2013

Book Review: Hanoi's War

Hanoi’s War: An International History of the War for Peace
in Vietnam by Lien-Hang T. Nguyen. The University of North Carolina Press, 464
pages, $34.95.

Whatever you think you know about the war in Vietnam will be
challenged, revised and deepened by this remarkable book. If you are of my
generation, for which the war in Vietnam, whether you were for or against it,
was a coming of age crucible, Hanoi's War is a must-read.

Lien-Hang T. Nguyen is a Vietnamese American, born, she
writes, "in Saigon in 1974 [with] kin who served on both sides of the
war." Her family fled Vietnam in the tumult of Saigon's fall. Hang — as
she shortens her name — grew up in a working class neighborhood of Pennsylvania
where the traumas and tragedies caused by the war were dealt with by silence.
She writes: "My family and I were shameful reminders of a war that should
never have been fought", adding: "I did not live [the war], but who I
am is a direct result of it." Her book came out of a need to understand
decisions "that led to the deaths of approximately 58,000 Americans and an
estimated 2-6 million Vietnamese."

Much is known about decisions made in Washington, by
Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon. The logic of the no less momentous
decisions made in Hanoi has remained, for the most part, obscure — until this
book. Hang's focus is on how the leadership in Hanoi steered a divided third
world country into full-scale war with the world's major military power, while
navigating the shoals of the increasingly rancorous — and for Hanoi,
treacherous — Sino-Soviet split.

The Soviet Union and China wanted to be seen as supporting
Hanoi in the signal anti-colonial cum revolutionary struggle of the day. What
they insisted upon in return was that Hanoi obey their dictates as to how the
war should be fought, so that it accorded with their national interests and
with communist ideology as they promulgated it. Their strictures could extend
from weighty issues such as whether peace talks should be held — the Soviet
Union largely in favor, China largely opposed — to the micromanaging of Hanoi's
military efforts. Mao, after all, was the fabled genius of guerilla war: to
disobey his instructions could be taken as an insult to the Great Helmsman.
China provided less material support to Hanoi than the Soviet Union but the
threat of its intervention imposed some limits on the application of American
force.

All this was further complicated by Nixon's trip to China,
and his subsequent visit to the Soviet Union. Both Moscow and Beijing sought
the kind of relationship with Washington that would free them to confront other
in earnest, in combat if necessary. Hang points out that the rivalry between
the two Communist powers had pushed well beyond Marxist polemics by 1969 when
"no fewer than 400 clashes occurred between the two nations' border
troops."

It took extraordinary acumen and determination for Hanoi's
leaders to maintain "equilibrium in the Sino-Soviet split in order to
conduct a total war for reunification [in] epic battle with the United
States." It also took the imposition of a police state, designed to
silence dissenting voices. There were those in the Hanoi's VWP (Vietnam
Worker's Party) who wanted to focus on building socialism in the North, leaving
the question of reunifying Vietnam for later. Others favored protracted
guerilla struggle against the Saigon regime and the United States. There were
also those who promoted the idea of decisive military engagements, which would,
they believed, trigger widespread uprisings in the South, topple the Saigon
regime, and drive the United States out. It was this group that prevailed. They
were the architects of the Tet Offensive in 1968, and similar offensives to
follow, all of them failures in military terms, in which the North Vietnamese
and the Viet Cong suffered, Hang writes, "staggering" losses.

It is one of the revelations of this book that Ho Chi Minh
and General Vo Nguyen Giap were strongly opposed to the strategy of General
Offensive and General Uprising of which Tet was a part. Both were marginalized
when it was enacted. By the time of the war with the United States — sometimes
known as the Second Indochina War — Ho was an aging figurehead. He was revered
for leading Vietnam to victory against the French but criticized for acceding
to the Geneva Accords of 1954 that left the country divided. Giap, similarly,
was respected for the strategy of guerilla war culminating in the French defeat
at Dien Bien Phu but came close to joining his followers in prison for
advocating the same strategy be employed against the United States.

Hanoi's real leader — Le Duan — was largely unknown in the
West and might have remained so but for this book. Le Duan combines steely
resolve with a certain romanticism. He was married in Hanoi but maintained a
lifelong commitment to a woman who had been his comrade in arms in the Mekong
Delta during the war against the French. He is, in a sense, emblematic of the
Second Indochinese war, a ruthless patriot who having seen the French replaced
by the Americans in the South is willing to go to any lengths to reunify his
country. Content to make use of Ho's charisma and Giap's reputation, it was Le
Duan with the assistance of his ally Le Duc Tho, who forged the police state by
means of which the Vietnamese were prodded into full-scale war and compelled to
accept the terrible sacrifices arising from the strategy of General Offensive
and General Uprising.

Though focused on Hanoi, Hang gives due attention to
Washington. We see Nixon as, in a sense, the mirror image of Le Duan,
centralizing power and enforcing secrecy as he evades Congress and his own
cabinet to launch massive aerial bombardments of Laos and Cambodia. Nixon
trades on his reputation as an extremist, withdrawing ground troops while
escalating the air war, convinced all the while, Hang writes, that he could
find Hanoi's breaking point "by exploiting his reputation as a hard line
Cold Warrior who was willing to take irrational military means to achieve his
objectives. Confiding to. . . Haldeman, Nixon stated, 'They'll believe any
threat of force Nixon makes because it's Nixon.'"

The story Hang tells is, she acknowledges, incomplete.
Vietnamese is her first language, her fluency in English achieved in the ESL
classes she attended throughout elementary school. Her language skills let her
make the most of the access she won, as a scholar, to the archives of the Hanoi's
Ministry of Foreign Affairs. She notes that she is the only scholar, Vietnamese
or otherwise, to have "received this honor." She is also quick to say
that the archives of Vietnamese Communist party and of the army remain sealed,
and are essential to a full account of the war. On the basis of this book, one
has the right to hope and expect that when those archives are opened, she is
given access.

I was alerted to Hanoi's War by an op-ed Hang wrote for the
NY Times this past summer
(http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/12/opinion/sunday/what-we-dont-know-about-vietnam-can-still-hurt-us.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0).
The book deserves more attention than it has thus far received. It enriches our
understanding of the War in Vietnam and by implication, subsequent American interventions,
including the war in Afghanistan.